Visualization of the internal structure of 3-D objects on a 2-D image is an important topic within the field of computer graphics and has been applied to many industries, including medicine, geoscience, manufacturing, and drug discovery.
For example, a CT scanner can produce hundreds or even thousands of parallel 2-D image slices of a patient's body including different organs, e.g., a heart, each slice including a 2-D array of data values and each data value representing a scalar attribute of the body at a particular location, e.g., density. All the slices are stacked together to form an image volume or a volumetric dataset of the patient's body with the heart embedded therein. A 2-D image showing the 3-D structural characteristics of the heart is an important aid in the diagnosis of cardiovascular disease.
As another example, the oil industry uses seismic imaging techniques to generate a 3-D image volume of a 3-D region in the earth. Some important geological structures, such as faults or salt domes, may be embedded within the region and not necessarily on the surface of the region. Similarly, a 2-D image that fully reveals the 3-D characteristics of these structures is critical in increasing oil production.
Direct volume rendering is a technique developed for visualizing the interior of a solid region represented by a 3-D image volume on a 2-D image plane, e.g., a computer monitor. Typically the scalar attribute or voxel at any point within the image volume is associated with a plurality of optical properties, such as color or opacity, which can be defined by a set of lookup tables. The 2-D image plane consists of a regularly spaced grid of picture elements or pixels, each pixel having red, green, and blue color components. A plurality of rays are cast from the 2-D image plane into the volume and they are attenuated or reflected by the volume. The amount of attenuated or reflected ray energy of each ray is indicative of the 3-D characteristics of the objects embedded within the image volume, e.g., their shapes and orientations, and further determines a pixel value on the 2-D image plane in accordance with the opacity and color mapping of the volume along the corresponding ray path. The pixel values associated with the plurality of ray origins on the 2-D image plane form an image that can be rendered on a computer monitor. A more detailed description of direct volume rendering is described in “Computer Graphics Principles and Practices” by Foley, Van Dam, Feiner and Hughes, 2nd Edition, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company (1996), pp 1134-1139.
Going back to the CT example discussed above, even though a doctor can arbitrarily generate 2-D image slices of the heart by intercepting the image volume in any direction, no single image slice is able to visualize the whole surface of the heart. In contrast, a 2-D image generated through direct volume rendering of the CT image volume can easily reveal the 3-D characteristics of the heart, which is very important in many types of cardiovascular disease diagnosis. Similarly in oil exploration, direct volume rendering of 3-D seismic data has proved to be a powerful tool that can help petroleum engineers to determine more accurately the 3-D characteristics of geological structures embedded in a region that are potential oil reservoirs and to increase oil production significantly.
Even though direct volume rendering plays a key role in many important fields, there are several technical challenges that need to be overcome to assure wide deployment of the direct volume rendering technique. First, direct volume rendering is a computationally expensive process. In order to produce a high quality 2-D image that can capture the 3-D characteristics of a 3-D target, direct volume rendering needs to process a large 3-D dataset, which usually means a large number of calculations. For example, it requires at least 140 million calculations to generate a 2-D image of 5122 pixels for a typical 3-D dataset of 5123 voxels using conventional direct volume rendering algorithms.
Moreover, many applications require that direct volume rendering of a 3-D dataset operate in real-time so that a user is able to view successive 2-D images of the 3-D dataset, each 2-D image having different viewing angles or visualization parameters, without a significant delay. In medical imaging, it is generally accepted that a sequential 2-D image rendering of at least six frames per second meets the need for real-time interactive feedback. This is equivalent to nearly 1 billion calculations per second.
Given the limited computational capacity of modern computers, more efficient algorithms have been developed to reduce the computational cost of direct volume rendering. However, many of these algorithms achieve their efficiency by sacrificing the quality of the generated 2-D images. For example, a common problem with discrete representation of a continuous object is the jitter effect, which is most obvious when a user zooms in to view more details of the continuous object. If the jitter effect is not carefully controlled, it may significantly corrupt the quality of an image generated by a direct volume rendering algorithm.
Therefore, it would be desirable to develop a new direct volume rendering method and system that increase the rendering efficiency while having less or preferably imperceptible impact on the image quality.